2008.01.19

UFO:AI 2.2: First impressions

UFO:AI 2.2 has been out for about a week now, but my link has been so lousy that I haven’t had a chance to grab it yet. Today things were a little better so I had a chance to grab it.

I didn’t really play 2.1 much because performance on my aging laptop was really bad as compared to previous versions of the game. I especially had a lot of problems with the mouse. On the world map, the mouse move too slow, in the combat missions it was overly sensitive and made the whole game a frustrating experience. So 2.1 was close to unplayable for me.

So far I have only had the chance to get a few initial glimpses of 2.2. Expect more as I get a chance to play around with it a little. My mouse problems seem to be gone, or at least much less than with 2.1. However, the game does feel a little heavy for my aging laptop. I think I can still manage.

The new intro screen looks good. The female soldier has a “slightly” over-sized weapon, which does look kind of funny. There is a new dialog at the very beginning of the game that asks you for your name and lets you set a few initial options.

When you have managed to build your first base, you will notice some new stuff here. There is an alien containment facility (or was that there in 2.1?). I assumed that the first mission would be the same as always and placed my base somewhere in the middle of Canada, expecting the first mission to be in my backyard. Big mistake. That has changed, and the first mission came up in North-western Africa. Oh well..

The missions is where having a cheap, lousy Intel video-card makes itself noticed. The game begins to feel a bit jerky. But, as I mentioned earlier, it’s no where near as bad as it was with 2.1 (at least for me). On the right day I’ll still be able to play the missions. Today, however, was not the right day, and I just played through a few rounds to get an initial feel for it.

I haven’t begun looking into the configuration options yet, to see what I might be able to do to optimize video performance. Had a quick look at the options screens, and it sure did look like they had changed quite a bit. Or is my memory beginning to fail me? Anyways, tomorrow being Sunday I should have some time to investigate a little. I don’t really mind losing some graphical detail in order to improve the speed/smoothness of the missions.

My first impression is that the game looks good. Of course, I haven’t had a chance to discover all the new goodies, like crash sites, yet. But I’ll get there. At least it feels like UFO:AI will start to consume some of my time again, which makes me happy.